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#IBMEdge 2013 - Day 2 General Sessions

Tuesday (Day 2) of the [IBM Edge 2013] conference once again started with live music from the rock band [Delta Rae]. I had the pleasure to meet one of the lead singers, Liz Hopkins, before their set! In the picture on the right, she is the brunette in the middle.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, and not for Sprint, Wellpoint or any other company mentioned on this blog post. I was not paid by any other company to mention their company, products or services. I have used Sprint in the past for my cellphone service, and I can say they are a great company from end user experience. As part of my job at IBM, I was a technical advocate for Wellpoint from 2009 to 2011 as they deployed their IBM Watson-based solution. I am an extended member of Jeff Jonas' G2 team.)

I have known Tom for a long time, since the 1990s when we both attended [SHARE user group] conferences, and he recently took over as Senior VP of our group. He started his talk about the innovative uses of "big data" analytics. For example, retailers can tell which shoppers are pregnant six months before birth of their child, based entirely on changes in shopping patterns, and can then send out "Hey, you're having a baby!" promotions targeted specifically to them.

Instead of the [Spray-and-Prey] of traditional direct-mail advertising that targets demographics based on broad categories of gender, race or income brackets, big data analytics allows our clients to get down to a "Demographic of One".

This is all part of IBM's "Smarter Planet" campaign that it launched five years ago. IBM has 3,000 research scientists (full disclosure: I was one, myself, before I switched over to development), investing over $6 billion USD per year, half of which is invested for our Systems and Technology Group that developers servers and storage hardware (or as we like to call it internally, the "M" in IBM). Here are some of the recent investments:

$1 Billion USD in Flash technology, including the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems

$800 Million USD in the development of eX5 for the System x server line

$2 Billion USD for PureSystems, including Flex System, PureFlex, PureApplication and PureData models. IBM has sold more than 4,000 PureSystems in 90 countries

$4 Billion USD for Power7 and Power7+ processors and the Power Systems that are based on them, which has helped IBM complete 3,400 displacements of competitive UNIX servers.

$1 Billion USD for zEC12, the latest System zEnterprise mainframe. Across all server types, IBM is #1 in worldwide server share, but the recent surge in mainframe sales certainly helps. Of the top 100 banks in the world, 96 run their mission critical applications on System z mainframes.

IBM is also getting serious about being a "Social" business, and is already #1 in Enterprise Social Software. (This blog runs on IBM Connections, which is available to our clients as well for their social efforts).

The right infrastructure is required for innovation. Corporate cultural change is also required. Transformation is the new business imperative

Karim Abdullah, Director IT Operations at Sprint

What I like about Edge is that instead of listening to one IBM executive after another, IBM invites key reference clients to provide their testimonials.

Over 71 percent of CIOs at leading companies are trying to figure out how to best take advantage of new technologies to improve their customer experience. [Sprint] is one of them, ranking #3 telecom in the United States.

Flash is a Game Changer. Leveraging technology of IBM Flash allowed Sprint to achieve 45 times improvement in performance of targeted queries for the call centers. Not only has it helped increase performance at Sprint, but also to reduce energy, floorspace, power & cooling costs.

[Wellpoint] is the largest health benefits company in the United States, with 36 million patients, and 600,000 physicians and medical specialists in its network.

Dr. Nussbaum spoke about the power of information. Citing a famous quote from Charles Dickens, he feels we are in the best of times, and the worst of times, when it comes to healthcare. On the best of times, we have genomics research that helps cure disease, and a variety of other science and technology breakthroughs.

On the worst of times, the industry is not without its own set of problems. Why are there such huge variations in healthcare, expenses and quality? We get the right care only 55% of the time. Part of the problem is that our reimbursement systems which focus on volumes, not outcomes. Wellpoint is working to fix this.

Dr. Nussbaum shared some shocking statistics:

$2.6 Billion USD is spent on Healthcare in USA, one third of this is wasteful and unnecessary

20 percent of patients are re-hospitalized within 30 days

From 2002 to 2010, annual U.S. household income grew only 7 percent, from $49,000 to only $52,000 per year, but medical expenses nearly doubled in the same timeframe, from $9,235 to $18,074 per year.

It's not enough to just spend nearly $100 Billion USD in public and private reserach in healthcare to get innovation, you have to put them to good use. Why did it take so long to put wheels on luggage for airplanes? It took six thousand years, from the invention of the wheel, to putting them on luggage.

Part of the challenge is that there is too much information, not enough time. Medical information doubles every 5 years. There are more than 21 million articles in [PubMed/MEDLINE], with 1 million being added every year. Only 12 percent of physicians' time is spent with patients and examinations, while 80 hours per week are spent with payors and administrators. For pre-authorizations for certain medical procedures or tests, 66 percent of physicians experience delay in pre-certifications.

Computer Science has evolved, from tabulation on punched cards, to programmatic logic, to new forms of [Cognitive Computing]. The Watson computer thinks like a physician does, and can understand natural language. Wellpoint's Anthem Watson Application can analyze the entire "Longitudinal Patient Record" of payors, labs, hospital EMR, physical office EMR, and Imaging. Watson crunches all this information available to recommend treatment options, dLiz Hopkinsecision support for oncology, and evidence-based care through pre-authorization.

Wellpoint is working with [Memorial Sloan-Kettering] to focus Watson-based efforts on cancer, based on analysis leverage 1.5 million patient records. More than 1500 people die of cancer every day. Wellpoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are going after 22 different cancers, including lung cancer and breast cancer.

Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP of Innovation

Many people felt that Bernie did not get enough time to speak on Monday, so he is back today for a second topic! He started with a quote:

Bernie gave examples how cyber-terrorists can easily bring down the US government and its financial system. In a recent analysis, more than 50% of software was found to have "back doors". Recent attacks show the extent of the problem:

Various parts of IBM are focused on security issues. IBM Research, Security Systems, X-force, and IBM Security Services are constantly innovating because the bad guys are innovating too! IBM's Watson vast cognitive computing is being put to work to help address security issues.

Innovation is transforming IT. If your laptop did not benefit from [Moore's Law], the computing capability would weigh quarter of a million tons! Of course, some people fear the worst. Bernie cited HAL in the movie ["2001: A Space Odyssey"] and SkyNet in ["The Terminator"] anthology.

IBM recently launched [MobileFirst], to bring together all aspects of mobile computing, including smartphones and tablets. In some countries, your mobile phone is your only connection to your bank, your internet, your friends and families. Unfortunately, there are a few malicious apps readily available for download from respective "app stores" for each device.

David started out with a funny analogy. A government employee suggested that elections should be as simple as getting your oil change at [Jiffy Lube]. Think about it, changing your car's oil used to be quite a hassle, and now you can drive in, and have your oil changed in 15 minutes or so.

David's response was that elections are already like oil changes, if everyone got their oil change only once every four years, and all got them on the same day, at buildings that have never been designed for oil changes, by people who have never seen the underside of a car, being paid less than minimum wage.

Jiffy Lube performs oil changes every day. Elections, on the other hand, are on a 48 month cycle, with little to no activity for 47 months, then for one month they have Black Friday-meets-Day-after-Christmas times ten.

One of the biggest factors to the problems of elections are the voter lists. Here are some astonishing facts about U.S. elections:

12.7 out-of-date records at any given moment, mostly because Americans are quite mobile. One out of eight Americans moved between the 2008 and 2010 elections. One out of four among young Americans move every year.

1.8 million deceased listed as voters

2.7 million people are registered in multiple states, often because they update their registration in their new location, but fail to notify their previous state's voter registration.

51 million (1 in 4) not registered to vote

One out of three voters think voter registration is updated automatically when they move

More than 50 percent of voters are unaware that the local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) can be used to update voter registration when drivers license information is updated.

Most voter registrations happen within 30 days of election, in paper form. Some states like Michigan process 99.7 percent of voter registrations correctly, but other states like Indiana process only 28.3 percent correctly.

When IBM's Jeff Jonas was invited by Pew to work on a task force on elections, he felt like Jim Carrey in the movie ["Yes Man!"].

Jeff Jonas showed via whiteboading, how to connect voter records that match by some key pieces of information, like birthdate and social security number, by cross-referencing voter registration lists with information from each state's DMV.

To address privacy concerns, Jeff added seven key privacy features, including a "Data anonomization" features for date-of-birth, Drivers license number and Social Security number, using a one-way hash that cannot be reversed to get the original number. The information from each state is anonomized before it leaves the state, so it is secure from the very beginning.

To explain the one-way hash, you take a pig through a special grinder and create sausage. Even if a malicious party had access to both the grinder and the sausage, they would not be able to recreate the pig in its original form.

The result is the Electronic Registration Information Center, or [ERIC] for short, which is a collaboration across seven states. ERIC has already identified 5.7 million eligible voters in these seven states. Over 300,000 registered months before deadline, using efficient online methods, now offered in 13 states, and is more cost-effective.

How cost-effective? By comparison, the cost to process a paper voter registration form is about 83 cents, but online processing is only 3 cents. This means huge savings for taxpayers and governments.

The [Edge2013 livestream replays] are still available. If you went to Edge2013, and want to see something again, or if you weren't there, and want to see what you missed, check it out!